George Seferis

George Seferis

“Today we need to listen to that human voice which we call poetry, that voice which is constantly in danger of being extinguished through lack of love, but is always reborn. Threatened, it has always found a refuge; denied, it has always instinctively taken root again in unexpected places. It recognizes no small nor large parts of the world; its place is in the hearts of men the world over”

-George Seferis, on receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature 1963

Greek poet George Seferis was born Georgios Seferiades in Urla, near Smyrna (now Izmir, Turkey). He worked as a diplomat for the Royal Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs and was the first Greek to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1963.

In 1914, Seferis and his family moved to Athens. He studied law at the Sorbonne in Paris and entered diplomatic service in 1925. Seferis was exiled from Smyrna when it was claimed by Turkey; he subsequently spent many years living and working outside of Greece. In 1962 he retired and moved to Athens.

Wandering and exile are present in Seferis’s poetry, and his work is attuned to the history of Greece—the Nobel Prize committee recognized him as a “representative Hellenic poet.” His poetry often intertwines contemporary speech and experience with Homeric myth, and many of his poems depict the landscape of the Mediterranean. In the words of his translators Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard – “The distinguishing attribute of Seferis’s genius—one that he shares with Yeats and
Eliot—was always his ability to make out of a local politics, out of a personal history or mythology, some sort of general statement or metaphor.”

George Seferis was an Elected Honorary Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and became an Honorary Fellow of the Modern Language Association.